Power consumption is one of the essential factors to determine the performance limit of the recent supercomputer. The importance of study on saving power consumed by the supercomputer has been widely recognized. That is, the speed performance per power consumption (Flops/W) is one of indexes for evaluating the supercomputer. The power for cooling operations accounts for approximately 45% of the power consumption of the entire data center. Reduction in the power consumption by improving cooling efficiency has been increasingly demanded.
Conventionally, the process for cooling the supercomputer and the data center has been performed through two different methods, that is, air cooling method and liquid cooling method. In general, the cooling efficiency of the liquid cooling method is better than that of the air cooling method because of superior heat transfer performance to that of air. Especially, in comparison with the liquid immersion cooling system using synthetic oil, the liquid immersion cooling system using fluorocarbon-based coolant has received a lot of attention because of the advantage in regards to the maintenance work for the electronic device (specifically, for example, adjustment, inspection, repair, replacement, extension and the like).
The inventor has already developed the compact liquid immersion cooling apparatus with excellent cooling efficiency suitable for the supercomputer of small-scale liquid immersion cooling type. Such apparatus has been applied to the compact supercomputer “Suiren” installed in the high-energy accelerator research organization for operation (Non-patent Literature 1).
The inventor has also proposed the improved liquid immersion cooling apparatus configured to allow substantial improvement in packaging density of the electronic devices subjected to the liquid immersion cooling (Non-patent Literature 2).